Multimedia Interaction and Intelligent User Interfaces
Consumer electronics (CE) devices, providing multimedia entertainment and enabling communication, have become ubiquitous in daily life. An important challenge for the modern CE industry is the design of user interfaces for CE products that enable natural interactions that are convenient, intuitive and fun. As many CE products are supplied with microphones and cameras, the exploitation of both audio and visual information for interactive multimedia is a growing field of research. Collecting together contributions from an international selection of experts, including leading researchers in industry, this unique text presents the latest advances in applications of multimedia interaction and user interfaces for consumer electronics. Covering issues of both multimedia content analysis and human-machine interaction, the book examines a wide range of techniques from computer vision, machine learning, audio and speech processing, communications, artificial intelligence and media technology. Topics and features: Introduces novel computationally efficient algorithms to extract semantically meaningful audio-visual events Investigates modality allocation in intelligent multimodal presentation systems, taking into account the cognitive impacts of modality on human information processing Provides an overview on gesture control technologies for CE Presents systems for natural human-computer interaction, virtual content insertion, and human action retrieval Examines techniques for 3D face pose estimation, physical activity recognition, and video summary quality evaluation Describes features that characterize the new generation of CE and examines how web services can be integrated for improved user experience This book is an essential resource for researchers and practitioners from both academia and industry working in areas of multimedia analysis, human-computer interaction and interactive user interfaces. Graduate students studying computer vision, pattern recognition and multimedia will also find it a beneficial and a useful reference. Dr. Ling Shao is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering at the University of Sheffield, UK. Dr. Caifeng Shan is a Senior Scientist with Philips Research, Eindhoven, The Netherlands. Dr. Jiebo Luo is a Senior Principal Scientist with Kodak Research Laboratories in Rochester, NY, USA. Dr. Minoru Etoh is Managing Director of the Service & Solution Development Department of NTT DOCOMO, Yokosuka, Japan.
With the development of silicon technologies, consumer electronics (CE) devices (such as personal computers, HDTV, mobile phones, digital cameras and game consoles) have become ubiquitous in daily life. These devices can provide multimedia sources for entertainment, communication, and so on. To interact with this equipment, consumers currently rely on devices such as remote controls, keyboards or control panels, which are often inconvenient, ambiguous and non-interactive. The question of how to design user interfaces for CE products that enable natural, intuitive and fun interaction is one of the main challenges the CE industry is facing. Many companies and institutes are working on advanced user interfaces. User interface technologies has been studied in various disciplines for decades. Considering that modern CE products are usually supplied with both microphones and cameras, the challenge to employ both audio and visual information in interactive multimedia has recently received much attention in both academia and industry. Yet interactive multimedia is still an under-explored field. Many challenges exist when moving to multimodal interaction, for example: how to annotate and search huge amounts of data acquired by using multiple sensors, especially in the unconstrained end-user environments; how to effectively extract and select representative multimedia features for human behavior recognition; and how to select the fusion strategy of multimodal data for a given application. To address these challenges, existing approaches must be adapted or new solutions suitable for multimedia interaction must be found. This book brings together high-quality and up-to-date research advances in the areas of multimedia interaction, user interfaces, and applications of consumer electronics.